The Queen's Lover (63 page)

But there was more. After that, Owain managed to rearrange the household so that things were easier. The Cardinal's rooms were changed, and Owain's antechamber with them. Owain suggested his master might prefer the sea view from the suite directly above Catherine's. The Cardinal had no reason to use the unguarded back staircase for servants, which linked the two floors.

Dame Butler was reassigned to attend the Queen Mother and run the King's little household. That was easy enough, too. The Earl of Warwick had been preparing, ever since that first dinner, to set off with the English army for the siege of Compiegne, where, it was rumored, Jehanne of Arc was planning to lead a French force to relieve the townspeople defending their homes. He wanted to be back in the world of men. He was relieved to have a plan put to him that would salve his conscience while keeping the King occupied.

Dame Butler was as delighted as Harry to get her little charge back. "I hoped this might happen," she confided, with her kindly gray eyes crinkling into a smile; "though I didn't think it would be so fast." There would be no more fencing and hunting marathons for Harry here, she added briskly. There was no point, and nowhere to ride without a military escort, and no one to practice with anyway now all the young knights had ridden off with Warwick. The child needed rest and thought to counteract all the overexcitements of travel.
She'd have Master Somerset show him around town, maybe; they'd start lessons in a day or so; but for now Harry should be catching up on his sleep. She didn't seem to suspect a thing when Catherine begged her not to trouble herself by waiting up to undress her last thing at night. "You'll have far too much else to do," Catherine heard herself say, and wondered at the smoothness of her deceit. "You'll be up at dawn every day with Harry as it is; and I like to sit up late. I don't want to keep you up till all hours...There aren't enough ladies here; but it doesn't matter in the least...I'm quite capable of taking my own clothes off at night; it's not as if any of us have to be especially beautiful here. We'll all just have to make do a little while we're on the road."

Catherine felt no guilt at any of the lies she told or heard drop from Owain's lips. In fact, she even enjoyed them: took pride in the quickness of wit she needed to remember each small untruth and fit them plausibly together; enjoyed the business of constructing a wall around her movements behind which she could be private.

They were all idle here; there was nothing to do but wait.

Any news that did come from out side was a tale of frustration. When Duke John wrote briefly to Catherine, a formal word of greeting, his letter referred in passing, equally briefly, to a coronation for Harry
in Paris.
She sighed over the word. Not Paris! Reims! He'd already started to imagine it all wrong.

She learned something similar from the Cardinal. He laughed a little as he told her; and he softened the blow further by starting, "Poor dear John; he always means well." But what he presented as a minor slip-up, Catherine felt to be a catastrophe. Duke John, it seemed, had mislaid Charlemagne's sword.

"Mislaid?" she said, openmouthed. "What do you mean, mislaid?" The Cardinal shrugged and tried to look serious, but he couldn't stop his lips twitching as he explained; he was clearly enjoying the idea of his nephew's discomfiture more than he was fretting over the loss of the sword. Seven years ago, after the burial of Catherine's father, Duke John had gone to Paris from the abbey of Saint-Denis with the sword. He'd
had it carried before him without touching it himself: a sign he was Regent of France but not quite King. His idea had been sound forward planning, not self-aggrandizement, or at least that's what he said: he'd wanted to have the sword safely at hand for Harry's coronation. But there'd been so much moving about since then, so many campaigns and shifts and panics, so many retreats, advances, surges, pullings-up, that the Duke was shocked but not altogether surprised to find no one could turn it up in the armory.

"He's saying a replacement will have to be used," the Cardinal said.

Catherine looked at the Cardinal, wondering whether even he had the least understanding of what he was saying. The English couldn't have lost Joyeuse, as if it was some old piece of rubbish. Joyeuse was sacred--a miracle in itself. It had a piece of the Holy Lance that had drawn blood and water from Christ's side embedded in its pommel. Charlemagne used Joyeuse to behead the Saracen commander he had vanquished after creating the Empire of the Franks.
The Song of Roland
had boasted four hundred years earlier that Joyeuse was the mightiest sword in the world and changed color thirty times a day. It was the most potent symbol of French majesty you could imagine; proof you could hold in your hand that Harry's French family, stretching back through the generations, united by their blood, had been favored by God since the dawn of time. And this man in front of her was talking of replacements...

"It will turn up. The worry must be that a sympathizer of your brother's has stolen it to pass to him...But at least your brother doesn't have it either," the Cardinal said.

She shook her head.

"Don't lose hope yet," the Cardinal added.

But Catherine felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She said: "This is just the kind of thing I feared."

The waiting dragged on through April, through May, and into June. It was easy enough for Catherine to plead headaches; stomach upsets; mysterious pains. All to be alone and think of Owain while he was occupied with his daytime tasks; while he
wrote letters with the Cardinal. No one noticed her distraction. Everyone else was fractious and bored. Only Harry was contented and cheerful to be with Master Somerset at his lessons, and following the guard to and from Lantern Gate four times a day, and, out of the demanding company of young men and the Earl of Warwick, playing on his own, finding hiding places behind curtains and under tables, making tunnels from cushions or just gazing out at the world going by in the courtyard. Catherine and Owain hardly spoke by day. She lived through the overcast daylight hours lying down: curling her feet up under her; listening to the sea; hugging her arms to herself; dreaming.

She slept late after Owain slipped away at dawn every day. She lay in bed, listening to the ragged fife-and-drum salute that marked the morning opening of Lantern Gate, peacefully watching Dame Butler move round her room, tidying away clothes, marking out items for the laundry and items for the menders; feeding Harry little morsels of sweets; letting herself be eased into her clothes; reveling in what they didn't know. It was as if everything outside her room--and everyone, even the old friends she was so happy to be with again--had become nothing more than shadows moving faintly on a cave wall. The light that illuminated her came from somewhere else; somewhere they couldn't see. And nothing mattered except her secret.

Catherine made a point of briefly leaving her own four walls each day. She walked and talked and helped Harry with his books, discussed meals with Dame Butler, prayed, and listened to Cardinal Beaufort's charmingly malicious accounts of the various mishaps that had befallen Duke John's forces in the field, or the Governor's more worried statements, that he was putting an extra guard on the walls by night, and hadn't heard back from the Earl of Warwick for a week, and then for two. But all she really saw every day was her own enchanting vision of what would happen later, when darkness fell. All that mattered was the joy of being alone in her room late at night, brushing out her hair, cleaning and scenting herself before the fire in a trance of anticipation, while waiting for the quiet
knock at the servants' door. Waiting to see her lover's eyes on her and his arms opening.

He'd said playfully in the night, one night: "Do you know how you often sit, when you think no one's looking, with your hand over your mouth, as if you were forcing yourself to keep quiet?" She'd been amazed; had started, almost indignantly, to deny it. "No, really. You do. Like this," he'd said; and showed her: a mask of baffled silence with eloquent, anxious eyes over a mouth tightly bound by fingers. Hesitantly, she'd raised her own hand to her face, mirroring his action; felt the familiarity of the movement; the comfort of the fingers and thumb clenched to her jawbone, the pressure of her palm against her lips. She'd laughed uncomfortably and dropped the hand. "Do I really?" she'd asked. "You always have," he'd said. "As if you were afraid to speak. Less, these days. But you shouldn't ever be afraid to speak; not here, with me."

It was the gray of dawn; darker than the gray of midmorning at midsummer in Calais, though not by much. Catherine didn't care. It was warm where she lay. She stretched luxuriantly. She could hear Owain feeling about on the floor beyond the bed, stepping lightly so as not to disturb her. He must be looking for his shirt. He was humming under his breath.

She felt her cheeks redden with quiet delight as she remembered how he'd lost his shirt last night. She opened the bed curtains. He looked back at her, smiling. He was holding up the shirt. He was shaking his head in wonderment. She could see he was remembering the same slow, intent passage from door to bed; every breath of it.

"Welsh," she whispered, in mock reproof. "You're singing that Welsh song again."

"Pe cawn i hon,"
he whispered back. Still smiling; still gazing at her as if he were memorizing every inch of her nakedness.

"I have to go," he said. But he came back to the bed. She sighed as his arms enfolded her.

"You have to go," she whispered in his ear. Then, "But what does it mean?"

He didn't answer. She pushed the hair out of his eyes. He was biting his lip. He was blushing.

"Please," she insisted, laughing again.

Looking carefully down at her with that bashful smile, he shrugged, then, trying to look casual, murmured, "It means,
'if she were mine.'"

She felt herself blush with her own embarrassed pleasure.

"And the rest of the words?" she prompted, encouraged to press him further; and when he didn't answer she sang as much of the rest of the lilting melody as she could remember. Her own singing voice was small and breathy; just enough to catch the notes. It didn't matter. "Your favorite song...see how well I know it...what does the rest of it mean?"

"You listen too well," he said reluctantly. He kissed her lips, silencing her.

"Tell me," she pleaded, running a hand up and down his back; reassuring herself, through the feel of skin and sinew, that he really was here with her. "Please."

He laughed. Sat up. Pulled the shirt over his head. Stood up to hunt for the tunic that had been left somewhere further off. She was watching his legs move across the floor when he went on "...the song, then...
'If she were mine, and loved me well...'"

She sat up. "Go on," she said.

He eased himself into his leggings.
"'Life would be only pleasure,'"
he continued more fluently after another pause, yet still pretending to be too busy dressing to look back at her.
"'I would not care for sacks of gold, nor other earthly treasure. Her winning ways, her wistful eyes, throw such a charm about her. She must be mine, yes, mine alone; I cannot live without her.'"

He shrugged and bowed, perhaps embarrassed only to be caught out in the small vanity of having clearly thought out this translation in case, one day, someone asked. In case she asked. Or perhaps for some other reason. He bent down to push his foot into a pointy-toed boot.

Then she realized something. The soft glow that began to spread through her at this thought stopped her tongue again.

Owain had been humming that song for years. Everywhere she'd seen him. Everywhere they'd lived. Even in the years when he'd hardly spoken a word to her beyond what was strictly necessary; when she'd thought he must hate her. It was proof.

Finally she said, almost in a whisper: "Did you always know? Really? Did you always feel...this?"

He was at the door now, struggling with the second boot. He didn't answer till he stood up again. His face mirrored the radiant softness in her heart.

"Always," he said.

The Cardinal was sitting at the Governor's desk, going through the dispatches. He didn't look embarrassed when Catherine walked in, thinking she might be alone here to watch the rain and think of Owain humming his song. She'd settled herself in the window and was humming it under her breath before she noticed the figure at the desk. He just nodded, as if spying on official correspondence from London was the most natural thing in the world for a cardinal to do, and said, in his honeyed voice, "It seems my troublesome nephew Humphrey is storing up more trouble for me back home."

She looked up at that. She still had the private smile of a moment before on her lips.

"Dear Uncle," she said. The Cardinal never looked worried, so she wasn't unduly concerned.

"Something to do with jewels," the Cardinal went on in mild, world-weary tones. "The jewels Henry gave me as a pledge against my loans to the crown. To finance the war. Years ago now; perhaps too long ago for anyone to remember things straight."

She raised her eyebrows. Tried, she thought successfully, to banish the memory behind her smile, in order to concentrate on the Cardinal's story.

"He seems to have got it into his head that I've stolen them," the Cardinal said gently. "He's being very pompous about it, in fact." He tapped the offending letter and shook his head in regret. "Stolen the crown jewels of England, he's say
ing. I don't know where he gets these ideas." He gave her a faintly quizzical look.

"Oh no; but why?" Catherine said faintly. He had her attention now. She'd been so happy that the Cardinal had come back to court; she didn't want any more open conflict between him and Duke Humphrey.

"The truth?" the Cardinal said. "I think it's really about politics...He thinks the Pope is about to recognize your brother Charles as rightful King of France--to go against the English war effort, in other words, and displace little Harry. And I'm the Pope's man. He doesn't know which way I'll jump. He thinks he needs to disgrace me in case I go against him."